Two paths toward a high school diploma

Leaders at Lafayette Adult Resource Academy and the Excel Center discuss the persistant public perception that Lafayette isn't big enough for both.

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With her son Derez, 9, seated at her side, Debbie De Ramus works on an economics tutorial for one of her classes Tuesday, May 27, 2014, at the Excel Center located inside the Howarth Center, 615 N. 18th Street in Lafayette. Pat Fassnacht, Regional Director for Excel Center, said De Ramus is one of the few students who always arrives early for classes and then remains afterward to continue learning.(Photo: John Terhune/Journal & Courier, John Terhune/Journal & Courier)Buy Photo

She was calling to inform Maxwell of the group's intent to establish an Excel Center in Lafayette. The publicly funded charter school caters to students 16 and older — almost the exact population LARA serves.

"They said, 'We've identified this as an area of need and we're going to move in,' " Maxwell said. "I didn't actually see that as a negative."

Yet since Excel Center opened its doors one year ago, less than 1 mile down the road from LARA, Maxwell finds herself confronting a common question from the public: Isn't Excel Center a problem for you?

"I'm asked that a lot," Maxwell said. "All I can say is that in the year we've both been in operation, that has not been a problem."

Leaders at each program say there's clearly room for both.

In Tippecanoe County alone, 8,826 adults older than 25 are estimated to lack a high school diploma, according to the Indiana Association for Adult and Continuing Education. That same data indicate that 27,071 people in the 10-county Tippecanoe area — and 536,210 people across the state — remain without a diploma.

"We're tapping into this group, this population that needs us," said Nioka Clark, who was director of Lafayette's Excel Center until she left last month to take a leadership position at a different location. "The growth (of Excel Centers) has been exponential over the last three years, and it's because of this strong need there is."

Excel Center Regional Director Patrick Fassnacht has assumed Clark's role as Lafayette director on an interim basis. Both he and Maxwell acknowledge that they alone can't meet that need. Excel's Lafayette enrollment ceiling this year tops out at 315 students. And LARA currently serves about 800 learners in its high school diploma equivalency program.

In 2010, there were 230,163 adults who participated in state-administered secondary education programs across the country, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The reasons those adults ditched high school are myriad. Lack of a supportive home life, an ill-timed pregnancy or just an absence of motivation are a few common experiences recounted by LARA and Excel Center students.

Whatever the reasons, there are real ramifications for those students who drop out without receiving a diploma.

• Workers who don't finish high school earn about $10,000 less per year than those with high school diplomas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• Boosting high school graduation rates by just 1 percentage point in 1990 would have resulted in 100,000 fewer crimes in the United States and produced a social benefit of more than $2 million, says a 2004 study by Lance Lochner of the CIBC Centre for Human Capital and Productivity and Enrico Moretti of the University of California Berkeley.

• The better-educated are substantially less likely to be in poor health or to face mental disorders such as depression or physical ailments such as heart conditions, according to a 2006 study by David Cutler of Harvard University and Adriana Lleras-Muney of the University of California Los Angeles.

Local school districts do what they can to impart that message to students on the cusp of dropping out. In a time of intense educational competition — which has triggered the rise of public charter schools and publicly funded private school vouchers — public schools are working hard to retain students who have the option of going elsewhere.

Adult education has not been immune to such competition.

With LARA, and now Excel Center, Greater Lafayette high school dropouts have more options than ever.

Explosive growth

Excel Center is a fairly new player to the adult education scene, in Lafayette and beyond. But its growth has been explosive.

The first Excel Center was established in Indianapolis in 2010 with an enrollment cap of 200 students. Within weeks, that cap was reached and the school expanded to take an additional 100 students.

Three Indianapolis centers opened the following year. And in summer 2013, $1.7 million was funneled into opening four more schools — including one in Lafayette.

As center officials searched for a director to lead the Lafayette campus, Clark was a natural choice. She had been lead teacher at the first Excel Center, and before that spent four years at a traditional high school.

Before her departure, Clark led the school as it established itself in a temporary space donated by First Baptist Church, and then she oversaw its move to a permanent location at the Howarth Center.

We're "seeing students change their lives," Clark said. "They come to us and for a long time they thought they were going to be constantly in that kind of life — where they struggle finding jobs. Watching them graduate and over the years achieve their goals is the most rewarding aspect."

When Stacey Fredson thinks about the impact Excel Center has had on her life so far, she cries.

Fredson became a single mother in the early 1990s and abandoned her education. Now she's working toward a high school Core 40 diploma through the Excel Center.

"Too many opportunities have presented themselves over time and I couldn't grasp them because of the education I didn't have," Fredson said. "Now I'll have my education and I'll be able to turn that around. I'm proving to my family, my children, my community that I can."

While the sudden expansion of Excel Centers benefited students such as Fredson, it had one unintended consequence.

Excel Centers are public charter schools funded from the same pot of dollars as other public schools. With each new center, more public funding originally intended for K-12 schools was sapped. In response, alarmed legislators capped Excel Center growth in 2013, putting Goodwill's plans for three additional Excel Centers on hold. That cap was lifted this year with a law aimed at more closely monitoring funding for new adult charter schools.

By contrast, LARA receives most of its support through state and federal funding, including an operating grant from the Department of Workforce Development. The result is that Excel Center really isn't competing with LARA, in a financial sense at least, as much as with other public high schools.

That's one reason Lafayette School Corp., which has financially supported LARA for years, has no relationship with Excel Center, said assistant superintendent John Layton. In addition to adults, Excel Center accepts the same high school-aged students that LSC serves.

"We don't have interest in working with people that are going to take our kids away," Layton said.

Although LARA and Excel Center target adults, each accepts students ages 16 and 17. The key difference is that LARA isn't dipping into the pool of dollars originally meant for K-12 to serve those students. It's more palatable, then, for LSC counselors to refer students planning to drop out to LARA.

"It's easy for people outside to see different schools as competing, but I think our missions are similar: To support people and build capacity for people," Fassnacht said. "The more people at the table helping people, the better."

LSC, like other local districts, has established its own support programs to retain students on the brink of dropping out. By establishing credit recovery programs at Jefferson High School and Oakland High School — a smaller alternative to Jeff — the district is working to catch those students before they disappear from LSC's halls.

"We don't want to lose dollars, that's for sure," Layton said. "None of the public schools can afford to lose dollars. We're working hard to make sure we meet the needs of those students so they don't have to go elsewhere."

Evolving for the 21st century

Although Excel Center didn't have LSC's blessing as it sought to establish its Lafayette roots, it had one major asset: LARA already had blazed the trail.

"We are incredibly blessed, because they are such a fantastic program with a stellar reputation in the community," Clark said. "They really kind of paved the way for adult education in Lafayette."

Initially called the Lafayette Adult Reading Academy, LARA was founded in 1976 through a grant proposal by a Purdue University professor. It emerged from a grassroots literacy movement sweeping the country.

Since then, the goal has changed. In 2001, the agency changed to its current name to better illustrate its diversifying programs, including the focus on high school equivalency degrees and its English as a second language program. These days, it's clear a high school degree will no longer cut it, resulting in the increasing focus on college readiness and workforce preparation.

Communicating that evolving mission, Maxwell said, is a challenge, even with the agency's embrace of social media and its expanded Web presence.

"They may have an out-of-date view of what LARA does," Maxwell said of the community. "Now in the 21st century workforce, it's beyond just a high school credential. That's not enough."

Excel Center's presence isn't alarming to Maxwell. It's the nature of competition — such as the battle that played out last year to see which privately run exam would replace the GED test that was phased out in January.

"The same thing has happened in public schools," Maxwell said. "Now there are virtual academies, charter schools. To me, it's about competition. (Education) is a huge money world.

"We have ushered in the world of competition in the world of education. And I think that is not just in K-12, but it's affecting adult education, too."

When it comes to the students, competition isn't a bad thing.

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Lafayette Adult Resource Academy students Stafford Duncan, foreground, and his son, DeMarkus, during class on May 5 at the academy in Lafayette.(Photo: Michael Heinz/Journal & Courier)

Stafford Duncan, 42, was 16 when he dropped out of high school. He spent his early life shuffling back and forth between between his divorced parents and schools in Indianapolis and New Orleans.

Dropping out was "the dumbest thing I ever did," Duncan said. "I regret it so much. I love my wife. I love my children. At the same time, you think what could I be doing if I'd done it right the first time?"

Now Duncan, along with his 17-year-old son, DeMarkus, are learners at LARA. He considered Excel Center, but it wasn't the right fit.

Stafford Duncan plans to move on to Ivy Tech Community College to study business and learn strategies he can apply to his small music label.

Lafayette Adult Resource Academy students Stafford Duncan, left, and his son DeMarkus during class at the academy Monday, May 5, 2014, in Lafayette.(Photo: By Michael Heinz/Journal & Couri, By Michael Heinz/Journal & Couri)

LARA and Excel Center are poised to continue growing their enrollments.

Maxwell foresees better coordination between the two. Why, for example, establish the same job-training programs Excel Center has when LARA can branch off, effectively offering two different programs?

"I just see that relationship growing," Maxwell said.

LARA and Excel Center are two different paths pushing their learners toward the same goal, Fassnacht said.

"We don't see ourselves as competitors," Fassnacht said. "We see LARA as another community resource. The more partners at the table, the more likely we are to find creative solutions and support one another."

That's a sentiment James Greenan, a Purdue University professor of career and technical education, echoes.

"It's our responsibility to help bring those resources together not in a competitive way but a collaborative way," Greenan said. "It's kind of like a cruise ship. We all have different jobs and we're all on different decks, but we all have the same guiding purpose."

By the numbers

Here are some numbers, as reported by LARA and Excel Center, respectively.

$1.1 million | $2.4 million

Budget

25 | 18

Staff

1,269* | 315

Students

193 | 13

Diplomas or equivalents awarded to date in 2013-14:

*About 800 of these are in adult education, with the rest participating in the English as a second language program.